A Decline in Creativity? It Depends on the Domain

Weinstein, Emily; Clark, Zachary; DiBartolomeo, Donna J.; Davis, Katie

doi:10.1080/10400419.2014.901082

Cited by 32 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…The results of Weinstein et al (2014) imply that individuals practicing within traditionally creative fields may not be experiencing the creativity decline seen by other studies. This suggests that the decline in creativity may be focused in fields traditionally thought of as less creative, such as engineering.…”

Section: Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 55%

An Investigation of the State of Creativity and Critical Thinking in Engineering Undergraduates

Sola¹,

Hoekstra²,

Fiore³

et al. 2017

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The goal of an undergraduate engineering education is to provide students with the necessary knowledge and skills needed to solve real world problems. Creativity and critical thinking are two abilities essential for success in the workplace, and are highly sought after by employers. However, there is evidence of decreasing creativity and critical thinking in senior engineering students. This study sought to understand if freshman engineering students are measurably more creative, but less capable of critical thinking, than senior undergraduate engineering students. Creativity and critical thinking were measured using the Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production (TCT-DP) and the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA), respectively. The data suggest that freshman engineering students were significantly more creative than senior engineering students. However, senior engineering students were found to be no better at critical thinking than their freshman counterparts. When compared to normative data, the senior engineering students underperformed significantly compared to the general population of senior college students. With study limitations in mind, these findings may suggest that senior engineering students are not only less creative, but also less capable of critical thinking, than when they started their engineering program. If this is indeed the appropriate conclusion, then there is a need to understand the underlying issues driving the decline of creativity and critical thinking in engineering undergraduate students.

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Section: Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 55%

An Investigation of the State of Creativity and Critical Thinking in Engineering Undergraduates

Sola¹,

Hoekstra²,

Fiore³

et al. 2017

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“…This abundance of literary production stands in sharp contrast to popular wisdom that today's young people are not interested in or even capable of long-form writing and use technology primarily for shallow interactions on social media [11,23,59,62]. What is it about fanfiction experiences that foster such engaged participation among youth?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Any phenomenon that draws millions of young people to participate and generate literary content, especially in a generation criticized for their inability to write coherently [11,23,59,62], is deserving of closer attention. In particular, understanding in more depth how networked publics facilitate this new type of learning and mentoring is vital for the future of formal and informal education as more and more young people spend a significant fraction of their waking hours online [23].…”

Section: Can't Think Of Any One Person [In Particular Who Has Influmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thousands of Positive Reviews

Campbell

Aragon

Davis

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work &Amp; Social Computing

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Young people worldwide are participating in ever-increasing numbers in online fan communities. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is taking place online in novel and unexpected ways. In order to understand and analyze in more detail how learning might be occurring, we conducted an in-depth nine-month ethnographic investigation of online fanfiction communities, including participant observation and fanfiction author interviews. Our observations led to the development of a theory we term distributed mentoring, which we present in detail in this paper. Distributed mentoring exemplifies one instance of how networked technology affords new extensions of behaviors that were previously bounded by time and space. Distributed mentoring holds potential for application beyond the spontaneous mentoring observed in this investigation and may help students receive diverse, thoughtful feedback in formal learning environments as well.

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“…This study was concerned with analyzing the technical and thematic dimensions of a large sample set of youth's creative productions (including literary and visual artwork) created over a 20-year period (Gardner & Davis, 2013;Weinstein, Clark, DiBartolomeo, & Davis, 2014). To analyze data from the visual artwork sample set, we developed a coding scheme that would capture in words the information embedded in visual imagery.…”

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confidence: 99%